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Why Jill Stein went to the front line of the climate crisis today

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein was handcuffed and arrested this morning after bringing food and supplies to a coalition of climate justice activists, known as the “Tar Sands Blockade,” who are attempting to stop the Keystone XL pipeline in Texas. She is currently at Wood County Jail awaiting processing.

“Everyone needs to step up resistance to climate-killing emissions,” said Stein, who was willing to risk arrest in order to show solidarity for this blockade. “Romney and Obama are only talking about the symptoms of climate change in terms of destruction caused by Hurricane Sandy; the blockaders are addressing the cause.”

Jill Stein was joined by seven others, including three blockaders and four members of the press. They were delivering fresh fruits and vegetables, canned proteins, trail mix, and Halloween candy. They were not warned of imminent arrests; and the arresting officers did not self-identify as police.

Prior to running for office, Jill Stein, a 62-year old physician and mother of two, had never been arrested.

“Climate change means more frequent severe storms that lead to massive flooding and destruction,” said Stein, speaking at the ongoing protests in Texas against the proposed Keystone XL natural gas project. “We will see more destructive storms than Sandy in the years to come. We have to stop spending our tax dollars to build homes in low-lying coastal areas and flood plains. The billions spent rebuilding the NYC subway system must reflect that sea levels will continue to rise.” Stein noted that the flooding of the NYC subway system had been predicted in several recent climate change reports prepared for the state government.

Stein has been the only national presidential candidate who has made dealing with climate change a major focus. She supports reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere to below 350 ppm. The Green New Deal, the centerpiece of her campaign, includes investing hundreds of billions of dollars to transition to a carbon neutral economy, paid for through cuts to the military budget, elimination of subsidies for fossil fuels and nukes, and higher taxes on the wealthy and Wall Street.

“We can’t just listen to climate change scientists for a few days after a disaster occurs, before politicians go back to business as usual. America has been both the major contributor to climate change and the major denier of the need for action. Obama and Romney’s push to develop more domestic fossil fuels will accelerate our rush down the path of destruction while increasing the profits of the oil, coal and gas companies,” added Cheri Honkala, the Green Vice-Presidential candidate.

The world already has five times as much oil, coal and gas available as climate scientists say the atmosphere can tolerate. So rather than drill for more fossil fuels, we must keep 80 percent of those reserves locked away safely underground to avoid a climate disaster.

While recognizing that climate change is already underway, Stein has laid out a number of major steps that should be taken to slow it down. Stein said that the government must also begin investing in how to mitigate its impacts.

“A major reason why our political and business leaders have failed to take action on climate change is because too many of them believe that it will be cheaper to deal with the consequences of climate change than to reduce it. The economic and human costs from Hurricane Sandy shows this to be the wrong calculation,” said Stein.

Crazy Weather: ‘Virtually No Other Explanation Than Climate Change’

New study, led by NASA’s James Hansen, refutes notion that weather events cannot be attributed to systemic climate change

– Common Dreams staff

A statistical climate change analysis led by NASA’s James Hansen, which will be presented in a report released Monday on the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that recent extreme weather events are not anomalies, but rather the result of a systemic climate change patterns fueled by man-made global warming.

“Our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change,” writes Hansen. Hansen, the scientist who first put the term “global warming” in the public lexicon over two decades ago, said over the weekend that what’s happening is not random or normal, but pure and simple climate change. “This is not some scientific theory. We are now experiencing scientific fact,” Hansen told the Associated Press in an interview.

In an op-ed published on Saturday, Hansen explained that the new analysis, which looked at the past six decades:

revealed a stunning increase in the frequency of extremely hot summers, with deeply troubling ramifications for not only our future but also for our present.

This is not a climate model or a prediction but actual observations of weather events and temperatures that have happened. Our analysis shows that it is no longer enough to say that global warming will increase the likelihood of extreme weather and to repeat the caveat that no individual weather event can be directly linked to climate change. To the contrary, our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change. (emphasis added)

Hansen also appeared on the PBS Newshour to discuss the findings of the report:

The Associated Press adds:

In a blunt departure from most climate research, Hansen’s study — based on statistics, not the more typical climate modeling — blames these three heat waves purely on global warming:

—Last year’s devastating Texas-Oklahoma drought.

—The 2010 heat waves in Russia and the Middle East, which led to thousands of deaths.

—The 2003 European heat wave blamed for tens of thousands of deaths, especially among the elderly in France.

The analysis was written before the current drought and record-breaking temperatures that have seared much of the United States this year. But Hansen believes this too is another prime example of global warming at its worst.

Hansen, one of the world’s leading authorities on climate science, has also come to exemplify the ‘scientist as political activist’ by clamoring for public policy shifts before Congress, writing op-eds and books, and participating in direct actions with environmental activists fighting against big oil companies.

Though he admits in his op-ed that his earlier predictions were “too optimistic,” Hansen says there’s still time to mitigate the worst possible outcomes.

“There is still time to act and avoid a worsening climate, but we are wasting precious time,” he writes. “We can solve the challenge of climate change with a gradually rising fee on carbon collected from fossil-fuel companies, with 100 percent of the money rebated to all legal residents on a per capita basis. This would stimulate innovations and create a robust clean-energy economy with millions of new jobs. It is a simple, honest and effective solution.”